Most excellent comments—a new feature

Commenting on It Is Us , by John Steppling—
(https://www.greanvillepost.com/2018/03/21/it-is-us/):

"...we in the West have become simply a large heavily armed group of amoral narcissists, sociopaths and psychopaths able to tell ourselves endless lies in order to maintain our privilege. 'Reality' is simply an impediment to be overcome."

gbossa_25

Great post. Amazing, but if you tell most Americans that Colonialism and Imperialism never died, and that as the unchallenged leaders of ongoing Western imperialism we are the most violent, lawless, terroristic nation on the planet, they look at you with total bewilderment as if you dropped in from another planet. This is of course testimony to the effectiveness of lying to the populace generation, upon generation, upon generation, regarding their "exceptionalism," and their "indispensability" to the rest of humanity, and their amazing ability to morally hover above the international laws that apply to mere mortals and thus feel justified in slaughtering whoever they want, because they only slaughter brown and black people for very good causes, etc. etc.

As a child I wondered to myself how chattel slavery had ever existed in America, how the genocide of Native peoples could have taken place, how the Holy Inquisition and witch burnings and the Crusades could have happened in Europe, etc. etc. I no longer "wonder" about such mindless blind Western brutality as the answer is made quite clear by the lack of interest today's typical Westerner has for the suffering he/she causes in the world.  As a people, we in the West have become simply a large heavily armed group of amoral narcissists, sociopaths and psychopaths able to tell ourselves endless lies in order to maintain our privilege. "Reality" is simply an impediment to be overcome in order for us each to reach the state of blissful self-satisfied happiness we all think we so richly deserve given how very "special" we all are.